Important Terms and People
In addition to addressing disciplinary concerns of interest to a fairly restricted group of scholars, the project repackages the data digitized and organized in the process of that research in a way that is more approachable to an interested popular audience. The Time Map below allows anyone-- someone new to medieval history, or a professional historian of science-- to discover snapshots about the texts included in the project's corpus and their authors. To use it, scroll through the timeline displayed at the bottom of the frame, and watch as place markers appear on the map. Clicking on any of the place markers will reveal a text box containing the text's (or texts') identifying metadata as well as a brief narrative introduction to both the author and the text (or texts).
As the project develops over the next year, one critical contribution of this component would be to visually represent the questions of indeterminacy which inevitably plague medieval historians, with the goal of making such ambiguity immediately perceptible to nonmedievalists. For example, visually representing a text’s alleged provenance might require developing case-specific regional GIS boundaries; or the likelihood of alleged authorship might correspond to the opacity of that writer’s name. Given that the technology allowing such gradations has only become available in recent years, this project would be among the first to meaningfully utilize it. Examples of gradations among metadata might include:
- producer (original author, likely author, possible author, anonymous, professed author, translator)
- date (produced; originally produced, if applicable; reproduced, if applicable)
- provenance (produced; originally produced or reproduced, if applicable)
- language (original language, if applicable; translated into, if applicable)
Please check back often as more data will be added monthy!